Republican Introduces Pathetic Bill to Create Trump National Holiday

In a rather pointless, sycophantic move, a New York member of Congress wants to make Donald Trump’s birthday a national holiday.

Republican Representative Claudia Tenney introduced the “Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day Holiday Establishment Act” Friday, hoping to designate the president’s June 14 birthday as a new federal holiday.

“Just as George Washington’s Birthday is codified as a federal holiday, this bill will add Trump’s Birthday to this list, recognizing him as the founder of America’s Golden Age,” Tenney said in a press release.

“By designating Trump’s Birthday and Flag Day as a federal holiday, we can ensure President Trump’s contributions to American greatness and the importance of the American Flag are forever enshrined into law,” the release states.

June 14 is already commemorated as Flag Day in the United States, signifying the date in 1777 when the Continental Congress decided how the country’s flag would look. But, it is not an official federal holiday, and Tenney seems to see an opportunity to curry favor with the present based on the fact that it coincides with Trump’s day of birth in 1946. (Trump’s birthday is also five days before Juneteenth, which commemorates the official end of slavery and which Biden made a federal holiday in 2021.)

Why is Tenney prioritizing this blatant attempt of brown-nosery instead of more pressing issues for her constituents, such as Trump’s game of chicken with Canada? Her upstate New York district includes areas right on the Canadian border, and tariffs could have drastic effects on those regions and on the state overall. Not to mention the lack of congressional oversight over Trump and Elon Musk’s overhaul of the federal government.

Congress hasn’t passed much legislation since Trump was sworn in as president last month, aside from an extreme immigration bill, even though Republicans control both the Senate and the House, and they are currently struggling through agreeing on a budget bill. Will passing vapid bills such as Tenney’s be what constitutes actual business for Republicans in Congress?

Self-professed free speech crusader Elon Musk seems to be trying to censor users on his own platform.

Matt Binder of Disruptionist reports that the billionaire DOGE head has blocked Signal links from appearing on X, citing researchers from cybersecurity company Mysk, who noticed the issue on Sunday and reached out to Binder through direct messages. Signal is a popular messaging app that encrypts texts between users, often allowing them to talk about sensitive topics that could otherwise be surveilled or intercepted.

“Elon Musk’s X appears to be blocking links to directly contact users on Signal,” Binder wrote on X. “Signal, the encrypted messaging app, has recently become a major tool for government workers looking to blow the whistle on DOGE.” Journalists are also using Signal to solicit tips from unhappy federal workers.

If a user on X tries to access a previously posted Signal link, they are shown a page warning them that they are visiting an unsafe link, but can choose to ignore the warning and click a link on the page to proceed to the Signal web address.

This move appears to be further confirmation that the free speech Musk seems to be so chiefly concerned with only applies to online right wing edgelords and neo-Nazis. People that draw his ire, such as journalists and embattled federal workers, don’t enjoy the same privileges.

Donald Trump is urging a foreign government to relax restrictions on a right-wing influencer charged with human trafficking and rape.

Andrew Tate, the former kickboxer and self-described “misogynist” influencer, and his brother Tristan, have been the subject of a protracted legal battle in Romania after they were arrested in 2022 on charges of human trafficking, sexual misconduct, money laundering, and organized crime, all of which they have denied.

The brothers were able to block their indictment in Romania for now, and they were freed from house arrest last month. They are still not allowed to leave the country as investigations continue, however, according to a court order. A Romanian court also ruled last year that after the court proceedings finish, the brothers can be extradited to the U.K., to face additional charges of sex crimes.

Tate’s name was first floated by a U.S. official during a phone call with the Romanian government last week, and then revisited by Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell, who spoke with Romanian Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu when he traveled to Munich last week, three people familiar with the matter told the Financial Times.

Another person said that a request was made for the brothers’ passports to be returned to them, and that they be allowed to travel while they wait for the court proceedings to conclude.

Hurezeanu declined to comment on his interaction with Grenell, but his spokesperson confirmed that a conversation took place. “Romanian courts are independent and operate based on the law, there is due process,” the spokesperson said, without getting into specifics.

The spokesperson said that Hurezeanu had initiated the conversation with Grenell, who he’d known since working together in Berlin during Trump’s first term.

Meanwhile, Grenell denied knowing Hureseanu at all. He “saw me in the hallway” in Munich and “asked for a meeting”, Grennel said, adding that the two had “no substantive conversation,” according to the Financial Times.

“I support the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets,” Grennell added.

Grenell had posted on X earlier this month claiming that programs funded by USAID had been “weaponized against people and politicians who weren’t woke,” adding that “Romania is the latest example.”

Tate is a central figure in the manosphere of contemptible internet chauvinists, a group of right-wing shills Trump was able to utilize in his run for the presidency. A 2023 study by Equimundo on the state of American men found that more of the youngest men trusted Tate than President Joe Biden.

Last month, Elon Musk expressed support for Tate’s strange bid to become prime minister of the UK. It’s possible that he thinks entering office could shield him from prosecution. Where have we seen that before?

Now, Trump seems to be searching for ways to pay back his staunch supporters—no matter how grotesque the accusations against them.

Elon Musk and DOGE are trying to get their hands on some of the most sensitive information the Internal Revenue Service has to offer: data on every single taxpayer, business, and nonprofit, according to The Washington Post. The request has put IRS officials on high alert.

The Trump administration sent the IRS a memorandum of understanding that would allow DOGE employees to infiltrate IRS programs like the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IRDS, which gives IRS employees access to bank information and personal identification numbers. DOGE also plans to send its own software engineer, Gavin Kliger, to the IRS for 120 days to “provide engineering assistance and IT modernization consulting.”

The memo requires Kliger to keep tax return information confidential and to destroy the information he collects once his 120 days are up. He is expected to be given access “imminently,” an unnamed source told CNN.

“The information that the IRS has is incredibly personal,” former internal IRS watchdog Nina Olson told the Post. “Someone with access to it could use it and make it public in a way, or do something with it, or share it with someone else who shares it with someone else, and your rights get violated.”

While the IRS’s systems could certainly use upgrades, allowing private citizens full-fledged access to millions of Americans’ sensitive financial information does not seem like the safest or most ethical way of going about it, especially without congressional authorization.

Elon Musk is pushing for a massive crackdown on free speech, by taking up the rusty rapier that is Donald Trump’s pitiable crusade against CBS’s 60 Minutes.

The president has been fuming about Kamala Harris’s interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes since it first aired in September, and claimed that the show had “defrauded the public” by airing different portions of Harris’s answer to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on different days. A transcript of the original interview released by the Federal Communications Commission earlier this month found that both answers were part of the same extended response.

“60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world!” Musk wrote in a post on X Sunday. “They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election. They deserve a long prison sentence.”

Musk’s fascist threat to imprison journalists was a deflection written in response to a post from 60 Minutes that criticized his efforts to gut USAID.

“President Trump says USAID is rife with fraud. But Andrew Natsios, a Republican former administrator of USAID, calls that ‘utter nonsense.’ Natsios says USAID is ‘the most accountable aid agency in the world,’” read the post from 60 Minutes.

Musk’s outrageous threat feels all the more prescient after the Trump administration last week moved to indefinitely ban the Associated Press from the White House and Air Force One, over its refusal to use the fake name Trump came up with for the Gulf of Mexico.